These are they which came out of great tribulation
The softness of a maritime October gives way to the grey barrenness of November. Leaves lie scattered on the wind in heaps of burnished gold and glowing amber; their autumnal beauty fading into the darkness of nature’s death. It is “that time of year,” as Shakespeare so wonderfully puts, “when yellow leaves or none or few, do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet # 73). Such is the twilight of nature’s year. Yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls there is a gathering, a gathering into fullness and glory. Such is the meaning of All Saints.
The lesson from Revelation signals the conclusion of the long journey of our souls as well as the nature of that journey of the mind to God, the itinerarium of the soul. It is a vision of the end of a kind of exodus, a going forth and return to the homeland of the spirit. It is the vision of the heavenly city, the gathering into truth of what otherwise remains scattered and broken, barren and empty. All Saints reminds us of who we are in the truth of God and of what we are called to be. The vision is redemptive of all that is scattered and broken, distracted and destructive in our confused and fearful world. It speaks to the confusions of souls everywhere. The vision is universal; “a great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues.” Beyond counting.
The gathering is into a communion of spirit united in prayer and praise, a community of angels and men; a community that extends beyond the present and embraces the past. The vision centers on the worship of God. But is this simply a flight from the world? A kind of escape from reality? No. The whole point is that the vision is the reality, the reality of the spirit without which our lives are empty and nothing.
The vision signals the redemption of images in the gathering of all things to the truth of their being. Ours is a culture obsessed with images and profoundly forgetful that images are not reality; they are only images of the real. Their truth is found not simply in themselves but in what they are and mean in truth. In Plato’s famous image of the Cave, we mistake the flickering images before us for truth. Only by being turned around do we embark upon the long process of education that leads us from the images to the things of which they are the images, and then to mathematical entities abstracted from them, and then to the forms or ideas of things visible and invisible, and ultimately to the realization of the Good as the principle upon which the whole structure of thought and being depends. Such is the journey of the soul to God.
In the culture of selfies, we need to remind ourselves that the images are not you. To put it in another way, there is more to you, to who you are, than the images that you project. Even the follies and frolics, the fun and fantasies of Halloween serve at best to challenge us about the idea of who we are. The masks of Halloween reveal and conceal aspects of our personality. Yet they are inherently ambiguous. The blurring of the boundaries between human and animal, between the living and the dead, between male and female, and so forth, only point to some greater sense of what it means to be human. The point in a way is that you are more than your image. We come out of the shadows and into the light and so to the substance of who we are. This is the great glory and wonder of All Saints. It offers us a vision of humanity redeemed.
It does not mean forsaking the images but a gathering into truth through the images. Far from a flight from reality, All Saints signals the gathering into reality of all that belongs to the truth of our lives. “What are these which are arrayed in white robes?” one of the elders asks rhetorically, himself a symbol of one of the writers of the books of the Old Testament in John’s great vision. “These are they which came out of great tribulation,” he says, and adds that they “have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The image signals the profound reality of the educational and ethical journey of our souls. It looks back to the sacrificial lamb of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac (or to the Islamic retelling of that story in Ibrahim’s intended sacrifice of Ishmael). More directly, it recalls the defining event of Israel in the story of the passover. God passes over the houses of the Hebrews which are marked with the blood of the Lamb. The story belongs to the rites of the Jewish Passover and carries over into the meaning of the Christian Eucharist.
As we saw last week in the wonder of the forgiveness of sins, Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and he wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins; “that you may know,” he says. The journey of our souls is through the trials and tribulations of our lives, through the ups and downs that belong to the experience of sin and suffering. There is no flight from this ‘unreal’ or negative reality of the human condition. There is instead its redemption. God makes our way to him through our sins and follies; it is a journey of education that brings us to truth, to who we truly are in the sight of God.
John’s vision is complemented by the great Christian charter of illuminating, purifying and perfecting love, the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. The Book of Exodus is an educational and ethical treatise which underlies the whole progress of the Hebrew Scriptures and beyond. The Beatitudes of Christ gather up the themes of that educational and ethical progress into eight principles, eight qualities of soul which define our life in Christ, the qualities of grace perfecting nature. They at once turn the world on its head, to be sure, because they make it emphatically clear that the world cannot be our home and our end. It is the via, the way, to the patria, the homeland, of our souls in the heavenly city. All eight qualities apply to us in Christ. “Blessed are ye.” The blessings are all about our life in Christ in the face of the limitations and even the hostilities of the world. They are the blessings of humility, of gentleness, of the desire for truth and justice, of mercy, of patience, of purity, and of peace. Our faith is not about worldly comforts or pretensions for such things are illusions. They are like the leaves scattered on the wind. Beyond the things which pass away are the things that are eternal.
The realities of suffering and of evil, of death and dying, of persecution and animosity are very real. We forget this and so forget the radical nature of God’s love which would gather us to himself by illuminating or enlightening our minds, by purifying and correcting our souls, and by perfecting and restoring us to his truth. The “chief end of man” as the Westminster Shorter Catechism wonderfully puts it, “is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” This is what John’s vision presents too, showing us what the first article of the Thirty-nine articles states about God as Trinity which gathers up a whole history of philosophical and religious thinking about God. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver all things both visible and invisible;” in which “unity of Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” This is the divine reality to which All Saints recalls us, the community of spirit united in God and with God and to God.
“To love that well which thou must leave ere long,” as Shakespeare concludes his sonnet, allows for the idea of loving things as they are in God and not in their passing character; in short, to love the world and ourselves in God. Only so do we learn to come out of great tribulation rather than by clinging to our concerns and obsessions. We are being gathered to God. Such is the power and the wonder of All Saints.
These are they which came out of great tribulation
Fr. David Curry
All Saints’ (transf.)/ Trinity XX, 2019